As a consumer of local content in 2019, I am ready to see bodies of work that focus on the Humanization of Black characters with well-rounded lives that are not solely centred around tried and tested concepts of tragedy, trauma…

1. To the feminist/activists and allies, in principle, we don’t need to agree on everything. We can disagree on how we achieve the UHURU we aspire to without being accused of being divisive and ‘dividing’ the movement. 2. Cis-heteronormative feminists,…

Growing up, I used to hate sitting in a car alone with my father for any amount of time. Those who didn’t know him personally saw him as a man with a very reserved demeanour, he came off as closed off. But those of us who knew him knew differently. Sitting in a car with him always turned into a mini-lecture I didn’t sign up for nor wanted to receive. You were stuck in the car with no way to escape because he disapproved when you wore your headphones while sitting in the car with him, he didn’t want us to be those people who sit together but didn’t talk to each other. My father’s plan was to be a new age dad who was open with his kids, his goal was to parent differently from his own parents. Growing up, he said he felt disconnected from his parents. He always said it, with some resentment, even though, they couldn’t give him what they didn’t have nor knew how to give.

So, his parenting was meant to be a do-over almost, he wanted to better the parts he felt his parents failed to deliver. But like them, he didn’t have what he needed to be this new age evolved father he aspired to be. He winged it as he went along like I imagine most parents do. As the oldest, I got to be the experiment. He wanted to be the dad that had the patience to teach her daughter how to drive (big mistake) and take her dress shopping for her graduation. The older I grew, the more complex his identity, life and desires seemed. At heart, he was (still) a conservative and culturally rooted black man who grew up in a village, but he aspired to modern fatherhood. He wanted to be like the new age men who were present and paid attention to their kids, but in reality, he worked a job that saw him leaving home for extended amounts of time so he could provide. When he was home, he was too tired to play soccer with his kids. For the most part, he really tried but, in the end, it was just good intentions.

The most major part of our relationship involved him imparting his knowledge about men and their illustrious behaviour. He was afraid that as a woman in the world, I could easily get taken advantage of once I leave the nest. He was trying to teach me things about men he thought would protect me from developing insecurities or ‘daddy issues’ in the future. My father and I bonded over unprovoked anecdotes (by that I mean he spoke and I quietly and uncomfortably listened while wishing I could escape through the window) of the stupid things he’s heard and seen men do when he was growing up. He used his teachings as unsubtle warnings and cautionary tales against dating men who were racially, culturally and linguistically different.

He didn’t trust white people for as far as he can throw them, the only time he was around whiteness was at work. He never allowed them to infiltrate his free social time. It even offended his sensibilities when he heard us use the English language at home. So, he warned me against socializing with whiteness, especially if it involved dating white men. My father also conveniently recalled hearing that white boys ‘were rumoured to have inappropriate relationships with their mothers’, so he didn’t want me getting involved with people who did such things. My father warned me especially against Zulu men because he was socialized to believe they were ‘hot-headed’, as a result, were not open to change because of their cultural beliefs and practices. He warned me against dating men from Limpopo (which is where our family is from) because they are ‘bad news’, but strangely that assessment exempted him. He felt that the men from home were undeserving of me, he believed he brought me too far to go back and date the guy next door. Asian men and those from the rest of the continent where not even in his foresight, so he didn’t even feel the necessity to warn me about the ‘flaws’ that may disqualify them as suitors. By the time I was in my early 20s, my dad had warned me against dating every species of men. He was convinced that it was safer if I never moved out from home and never dated. In his experience men and women could never be just friends because he was convinced ‘men always want sex’ from women, that men couldn’t help themselves. In his world, the formation of friendship was just an act of pretending by a man who was just waiting for an opportunity to strike.

By the time I was in my 20s, I had listened to enough lessons to know that men were nothing but trouble. I had subconsciously (I was unaware because at no point during these conversations with my father had I thought that I was actively listening to what he said) absorbed all this data about the different ways boys who will eventually become men, could manipulate young women like me into doing things they didn’t want to do. My father taught me that there are men in the world who will not respect my agency just because I was a girl who will eventually mature into a woman. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I had felt empowered and disempowered by all this information. Empowered because I knew how to not let men pull a quick one over me, disempowered because my father had turned me into a cynical pessimist. Men where the thing which I couldn’t and shouldn’t trust with my life and my body. Although I hadn’t always known how to articulate what that meant, I’ve always known that they were men in the world getting away with being trashy. I had known, that the world was unfair to people like me, just because they were women.
As an adult, I’ve come to realize that my father long made a habit of warning me against young men he’s afraid would treat me the same way he treated other people’s daughter when he was young. I imagine now that his teachings were partly self-reflective. Even now as an adult, my father is still afraid for me because he knows firsthand what men are capable of. He primarily used our relationship to shelter me from heartbreak and from the world, but in all of his narratives, men always showed up as oppressors. Everything that I knew about men in the world was through his male gaze. But also, everything he taught me was always easy to believe because they were enough men around us who served as living testimonies of his warnings. He didn’t need to do much to convince me that what he was saying was real and reflective of the world. In my case, this version of the truth especially resonated because I had(ve) a biological father who chose to leave me as a child after things didn’t work out with my mother. Having a father who left their child was one more case study my father used to prove why I needed to thread through life with caution.

I learned from my father that as a young girl growing up in a world where men were constantly sexualizing my kind, I had to dress ‘modestly’ in order to avoid grabbing the ‘wrong kind of attention’. He emphasized (still does) the value of covering up my body from the world because my bare skin was a dangerous weapon the male species would use to violate my body. When I was old enough, he told me about the value of buying my own condoms if I am in a sexual relationship because ‘I shouldn’t trust men to not put holes on them to trap me with a baby’. He told me about men with a tamper who would easily take my life. He taught me that I shouldn’t sweat and sacrifice myself in the name of helping a man build his career, because once they succeed they will leave me for someone else better. He told me, men will turn and leave you stranded and you wouldn’t even see it coming. My father is a complicated man, he wanted me to get an education, but he was afraid the education was turning me into someone he didn’t recognize nor could relate to. He raised me to be strong-willed and independent, as long as my will wasn’t used to talk back or disagree with him. He raised the kind of daughter he wasn’t equipped to deal with. Our relationship only works if he goes unchallenged. In the end, he helped raise a feminist daughter whose ideologies he couldn’t understand. My father and I disagree on many things, most things really. But he did the only thing he knew how to do, to prepare me for a world he thought would not treat me fairly.

In our fight, it becomes easy to forget to make sure we bring everyone along. As an able-bodied middle-class cis-heterosexual activist, our default setting is gender-based-violence and the struggles we face as cis-women in the world. Thus, we don’t often challenge our socialization to ensure we equally bring to the fore sexuality-and-identity-based struggles that alter the very real lives and experiences of transgender, queer and gender-non-conformist (GNC) people who live in a patriarchal society that persists on linear notions of gender and sexuality. Hence, we still think it’s ok to promote ideas around the #futureisfemale, what about the future of those who don’t identify as such? Do they not have a place in the so-called future, even though we fight in their name in our claim for intersectional feminism? Currently, our feminist movements are window-dressing as intersectional, we haven’t found nor implemented fundamentally tangible ways that truly reflect an inclusive struggle that does away with cis-heteronormativity as the dominant narrative.

Intersectionality as a practice is still in its infancy, although many of us have every intention of creating more nuanced spaces and narratives, the notion remains fundamentally an ideal in most parts of the world. We need to be willing to acknowledge that reflecting a more representative feminism is still an illusion because we haven’t reached a point where we fully acknowledge that the current system has created hierarchies of the ‘oppressed’. An understanding that the marginalized can just as easily become the oppressor if we don’t come to terms with the power and privileges that we possess in the face of such issues (despite how minuscule we might assume they are). That, unfortunately, not all oppressed groups suffered/were marginalized equally. Our struggles are intersectionally different, even when we were historically clustered under the same umbrella. Failure to acknowledge and come to terms with such nuances is a failure to acknowledge everyone’s lived experiences. Thus, we didn’t and don’t experience marginalization in the same way because everyone is different, hence things like sexuality, gender, class, race, disability, identity etc. alter where we are on the spectrum of the marginalized. We need nuance in our activism, by that I mean, make sure there is a safe space for all to speak and represent themselves in a way that reflects their reality. Everyone’s voice needs to respected and treated with equal value. We can’t apply the same solution to everyone’s challenge, even in cases where we assume we have a shared and or common cause. People need to be able to tell their own stories without having to worry about catering to the cis-heteronormative gaze.

Tensions arise because of our failure to reflect intersectionality, with others cautioning against having such public conversations about our disagreements. There is worry that since for the first time women’s issues are being prioritized, highlighting such tensions runs the risk of making those who benefit from the system think that there are fractures within our movement. That if we challenge each other on our own problematic behaviour as women who are demanding to be treated with some humanity and equality, it gives the impression that men were right to treat us like second class citizens since we can’t even ‘get along with each other’. That the demand for accountability and the expectation for us to do and be better could put the success of the movement at risk. Cautioning that it’s too early in our movement to hold each other accountable to avoid giving men reasons to think we are already failing in our activism because we disagree in how we approach our goal for a fair and equal world for all those who continue to be marginalized by the system. And I can understand the basis of such a fear, but I don’t believe that a call for accountability excuses the violence of patriarchy, one has nothing to do with the other. It’s like saying that corruption by a black government excuses apartheid, and the need for white people to racially abuse black politicians as though apartheid was an ideal state. This is to say; every great and revolutionary movement has tensions, we shouldn’t allow the prospects of a male gaze to dictate to our movement. We don’t seek their validation, so their ‘disapproval’ is a non-matter.

When we do this work, we need to be open to the idea that we are bound to get uncomfortable in the process. Know that no struggle was ever won without tensions. We need to get comfortable with getting uncomfortable. We will make mistakes and get called out, but our response shouldn’t be to get defensive because we are not under attack. We should accept that we wouldn’t always have answers but try to figure it out. We need to come to terms with the very real reality that our activism tends to be exclusionary in its erasure of sexuality issues because it’s easier to fight when we only have one common enemy (the men). But what happens when the black cis woman ignorantly participates in the victimization and erasure of transgender and GNC people, as white feminists have done to black women for decades? When we use our internalized and unchecked misogyny to dominate spaces that are meant to be intersectionally inclusive?

We have a responsibility to ensure that we don’t become the patriarchy we try to dismantle, make a consciously concerted effort to continuously check ourselves to ensure not only one narrative is dominant at the erasure of others. Our activism needs to challenge the notion of one linear perception of womanhood that’s trans and GNC exclusionary. Our collective fight needs reflect the experiences of intersectionally nuanced pupils, acknowledge that violence manifests differently for different people. For a cis-hetero sexual woman, the violence could be from a man who was meant to love them. For a cis-queer woman, the violence could be from a woman they are involved with or a man who thinks she has no place in the world as a queer person. It’s invisibility and being erased by families who pretend your queerness is a phase you will outgrow. For a trans and GNC person, the violence could be from all of us with our corrosive language. It could occur in the form of physical violence by people who refuse to acknowledge their inherent identity or by a society with systemic institutions that wouldn’t allow her/they/them/their to formally change their preferred sex. It’s institutionalized oppression that wouldn’t allow her to use the services of public health care to transition into the woman she has always been. It’s all of us not being mindful and respectful of how they choose to identify. It’s being misgendered by families who say you defy God, nature and convention when their God was not in the room when they chose to bring you up as a boy instead of a girl. We need to remember that inclusivity is not tolerance, it’s about accepting people for who they are. We have a responsibility to be more considerate of the realities carried by other people’s bodies outside our own. We need to be more compassionate and empathetic. We should intentionally check ourselves from expecting queer, trans and GNC people to assimilate into cis-heteronormative activist narratives that don’t always include sexuality and identity-based conversations.

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About Us

WokeProject was founded by a Feminist Blogger,Thought Leader and Anthropologist from Johannesburg, Rebone Masemola.

She created the platform because there is a gap when it comes to a diversified representation of the stories of minority groups. She felt that the mainstream media doesn’t truly report on narratives and the lived realities of Women of color, Youth and LGBTQI communities in a way that reflects and resonates with their daily lives.

Features

WokeProject serves as a space for alternative narratives, it promotes visibility and the celebration of marginalized groups. We do regular panels and interviews for PowerFM to shine a light on issues around gender & sexuality, and make commentary and pop-cultural critiques. We have been featured in BubblegumClub Magazine, BBC Minute, KayaFM, SowetoTV, Financial Mail, 702, SAFM andCapeTalk. Our content has also been published on News24 and Huffpost South Africa.

To supplement and bring to life the conversation we have online, we host Bimonthly events called #WokeSaturdays where we invite a host of people to come engage, teach and share stories around their lived experiences.